'Wolverine' Campaign Wins Shorty Award

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has taken home a Shorty Award for Best Social Media Campaign for Film, thanks to the success of the home entertainment social campaign for The Wolverine.

The sixth annual Shorty Awards, which honor people, organizations and campaigns on Twitter and social media, were held April 7 in New York. Fox was the only nominee from a home entertainment division and the only winner ever from a home entertainment campaign, the studio said.

The Wolverine social media campaign, held for six weeks around the Dec. 3 DVD and Blu-ray Disc release, engaged fans on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and SnapChat (on Facebook alone, fans of the film grew to more than 5.3 million). The studio created a “WolviLeaks” story arc, featuring declassified documents covering the course of Logan’s life, and in a platform first, Fox gave fans sneak peaks on SnapChat, before declassifying them on other channels. Overall, the studio estimates the campaign reached more than 15 million people.

The 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment win beat out theatrical social campaigns for The Purge, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

“By running social media analytics of the community we knew what content excited fans the most: the ‘lost years’ of Logan’s story,” the studio’s campaign description reads. “In fact, anything connected to conspiracy theories, rumors or fan folk lore about The Wolverine drove mass discussion (average three times higher). The idea: ‘Wolverine Declassified,’ a multiplatform social campaign of recently ‘declassified’ documents about Logan’s life (all 165 years of it) that fans searched for and discovered in a social media treasure hunt across five branded platforms.”